Jacky talks about killing him, slitting his throat from three till nine and hanging him upside down so the blood drains out of him the way it ran from the baby pigs they used to slaughter in her village before a funeral feast. He deserves it, really, she says, for his freeloading, for his hanging around, for how he just stands there, spindly-legged and narrow-chested and pimple-faced with his big yearning eyes, and just begs for another hit.

She has run out of methamphetamine, what the Thais call yaba (mad medicine), and she has become agitated and irritable...